Evangeline Lilly to Disney: ‘Shame On You’ for Marvel Layoffs

It’s not just Marvel fans who were surprised and troubled by the news that Marvel was laying off “nearly the entire Academy Award-winning visual development team at Marvel Studios” — at least one Marvel star is outraged over the move.

Evangeline Lilly — who appeared as Hope Van Dyne (AKA the Wasp) in three Ant-Man movies, Avengers: Endgame and an Ant-Man attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland — filmed a reaction to the news about Marvel Studios’ visual development team and posted it to Instagram, where she wrote “@disney SHAME ON YOU for turning your back on the people who built the power you are now using to throw them away.”

READ MORE: An Interview With Marvel’s Andy Park About Designing the MCU

She added “To the @marvelstudios artists who designed and brought to life the glory days of Marvel...I salute you . I was there. I know what you did. I know how passionately you worked round the clock to make magic happen. You are the magicians, no matter what the Wizards of our new Oz make it look like going forward. I will never forget.”

She also singled out and credited the work of Andy Park, one of the longest tentured members of the Marvel visual development team who was part of the recent round of Disney layoffs. In his own post about the news recently, Park wrote “I was there at the start of a team that broke the mold. 16 years, 40+ films, and 15 films led as Director of Visual Development, I couldn’t be prouder of the history we made.”

The word from Forbes is that Marvel plans to hire freelance artists to contribute to the design of movies “on a per-project basis” moving forward, while keeping just “a skeleton crew of full time production staff to coordinate” their work. How this news will affect the quality of Marvel’s designs will only be clear in a couple of years. The studio has Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday both headed to theaters later in 2026.